It is easy to miss, and that quality of quiet concealment seems appropriate for a building whose history is considerably more entangled than its pastoral surroundings suggest.

The church at Kilferagh, as the site was historically known, has two distinct structural phases. The original building, dated to around the tenth or early eleventh century, was a modest single cell with antae, the projecting side walls that extend beyond the gable ends and are characteristic of early Irish church architecture. Around 1200, this earlier structure became the chancel of a much larger nave added to its west, and the original west doorway was removed to make way for a semicircular chancel arch of cut sandstone voussoirs with diagonal tooling, resting on limestone jambs. The patron saint is disputed: an early twentieth-century account identified him as St Fiachra of Meaux in France, with a feast day on 30 August, but more recent scholarship suggests the dedication is more likely to the St Fiachra associated with nearby Ullard in Co. Kilkenny, whose feast falls on 8 February, a date cited by James Phelan, the seventeenth-century bishop of Ossory. The ecclesiastical politics surrounding the place were no less complicated. By 1192, Kilferagh appears in a confirmation of a grant of its lands made by Domnall Mac Gilla Pátraic, king of Ossory, to Archbishop John Cumin of Dublin. Shortly after 1200, a number of Ossory churches including Kilferagh were granted to the Abbey of St Augustine in Bristol, an arrangement presumed to have been made by William Marshal during his time in his Leinster lordship. By 1218, four parties were contesting the lands: St Augustine's, the archbishop of Dublin, Jerpoint Abbey, and the Avenels, local lords of Kilferagh. The two local parties, Jerpoint and the Avenels, prevailed, though St Augustine's retained the rectory. In the eighteenth or nineteenth century the chancel arch was partly blocked and fitted with a flat-headed timber-lintelled doorway and an iron gate, effectively enclosing the chancel as a private burial place for the Shee family. A 1645 will from one Robert Forstall of Kilferagh asked that he be buried in the parish church, in his ancestors' monument, suggesting the space had long carried that kind of family significance.

Several objects once associated with the chancel have since been moved to the Shee Almshouse on Rose Inn Street in Kilkenny city. An armorial plaque, which the historian Carrigan thought may have originated in Richard Shee's castle at Bonnetstown or his Kilkenny townhouse, is now set into a recess on the almshouse façade. A door lintel bearing an inscription was also relocated there, described by Carrigan as most probably from a former Shee residence in Sheestown. The chancel itself still holds a thirteenth or fourteenth-century graveslab and two from the sixteenth century, and the semicircular arch with its finely tooled sandstone voussoirs remains largely intact, framing a view into a space that several powerful institutions and families once found worth fighting over.